Curry Malott

Letter to Educators

In this letter it is my intention to primarily speak to my likely audience, that is, those teachers and future teachers studying education in possibly a teacher education or doctoral program. As a student you are in the process of acquiring some form of degree or certification to work in an institution of education. Given the fact that you are about to give yourself over to an institution for the better part of your productive life, it seems reasonable that you might be at least a little bit interested in what exactly it is you are getting yourself into.

Mexican American Student Resistance: From Spontaneity to Organization

ABSTRACT Having challenged student resistance scholarship for glorifying forms of resistance that tend to be self-destructive to students, the field has shifted to supporting and advancing more transformational forms of resistance, such as organizing campaigns for social justice issues. While this is a welcome advance, the conception of transformative employed by researchers tends to be limited to reformist agendas. Situating student resistance in a historical context through a re-reading of Marx and Lenin offers a deeper framework for understanding and organizing student resistance. Making these points, I draw on the Mexican American historical and contemporary context for illustrations.

Capitalism, Socialism, and “The Gap Between”: Review of Communist Study: Education for the Commons by Derek R. Ford

ABSTRACT Derek R. Ford’s Communist Study: Education for the Commons advances communist pedagogy. What is surprising about Ford’s project is that his contribution to Marxism comes from an engagement with work associated with postmodernism—work largely based upon a rejection of the Marxist tradition. Communist Study, however, stems from the problematization not of Marx, but of Marxist scholarship in education.

Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue

Like millions of white working-class American youth in the post-WWII boom era, my parents, seeking the upward mobility a university education promised, attended and met at college in the late 1960s. My mom and my dad’s ancestral trajectories are strikingly similar—from Western European immigrants, to Ohio farmers, to factory works, to carpenters and construction workers, to university professors.

It’s time for critical educators to join the Party: A response to our reviewers

Capitalism necessitates change and as such, Marxism—as a political critique of and movement against capitalism—has to be engaged as a living and breathing thing, as something that both responds to the current moment and anticipates future developments. It is with a deep recognition of this fundamental requirement that we welcome the comradely engagements of our book, Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming (Malott and Ford, 2015) by four activist-scholars. We think that each review does justice to the content, form, and spirit of the work, not only summarizing the main arguments presented, but also, and more importantly, by gleaming new insights and positing new questions and challenges for revolutionary pedagogy and for revolutionary organizers and movements more generally. In line with this, our own thinking has changed and developed in the months since the book was written and published and, tellingly, each reviewer has highlighted some of the problematics with which we have recently been wrestling. One of the components of revolutionary pedagogy that we believe is most pressing to address is one that we remarked on several times in the book, but only in passing, and it is also one that each reviewer mentioned, either explicitly or implicitly: the necessity of the Party. Zane Wubbena picks this up when he identifies the third chapter—which emphasizes the importance of the Party and the Party’s program—as the fulcrum on which the entire book rests. Michelle Gautreaux and Sandra Delgado pinpoint the problematic of the Party in the series of questions that they pose around issues of teacher-student relationships, agency, authority, and knowledge. And David Backer brings up the Party when he wonders about the ontological aspect of our project and the nature of truth that such an ontology demands. That each reviewer acknowledges this question of organization is not incidental. Indeed, we would argue that the contemporary left’s skittishness about the Party represents a—if not the—crucial problem of our moment, particularly in North America. And while we don’t dedicate a chapter to the Party in this book, the reviewers excavate its importance for the project based on our insistence on the global class struggle, the necessity to combat anti-communism and to defend workers’ states and actually existing socialism, and what Backer calls the general “Leninist fervor” of our writing.

Coming to Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogies emerge as direct responses to concrete material conditions and historical processes. For example, the word socialism first appeared in England in the nineteenth century as a socio-economic alternative vision to capitalism (Cole, 2008). Enslaved Africans in the southern region of what would become the United States forged a black liberation theology as part of the struggle to end slavery.